Tennessee scores lowest in the nation for binge drinking

'It's not Southern culture,' clinical psychologist says

Yes, Tennesseans petitioned Congress this year to christen a national holiday in honor of Jasper Newton "Jack" Daniel. And, sure, there's a drink named a "Tennessee cowboy" that's an excuse to rev up your whiskey with Red Bull.

But despite the recent Cooper-Young Regional Beerfest, or the wine tasting at the Memphis Zoo, or the "gallon of Southern Fun" served at Silky O'Sullivan's on Beale, or the personal steins Bosco's keeps for its regular brew buddies, or the townsfolk (578) who have guzzled all 200 varieties of beer at The Flying Saucer, or even the occasional jugs of moonshine passed around house parties -- it turns out Tennessee, home of the Jack Daniel Distillery, has the lowest incidence of binge drinking of any state.

Nationally, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, about 20 percent of adults binge drink, which is defined as having four drinks in one sitting for women or five drinks for men.

A cocktail of states that identify as Southern or Appalachian -- from Kentucky and West Virginia over to Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama and Florida and through to Arkansas and Mississippi -- share a low general incidence of binge drinking, ranging from Tennessee's 6.8 percent to 14.2 percent.

Wisconsin has the highest national incidence at 23.9 percent.

Those are the findings of a new report from the CDC based on self-reported surveys of 412,000 adults from the 2009 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System and 16,000 high school students from the 2009 National Youth Risk Behavior Survey.

The findings might skew one way -- binge drinkers were more likely to be male, white, 18-34 and with incomes greater than $75,000 a year -- because those populations are more responsive to self-reported surveys.

"You're not going to get data from people under bridges or tent cities," said Bruce Emery, assistant commissioner of Alcohol and Drug Abuse Services at the state's Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities.

Moonshine is an economic activity more than a consumptive activity, Emery noted, explaining that, in some parts of the state -- eastern Tennessee, for example -- people make moonshine because there's no other way to make money.

Of course, there are less clinical explanations behind the binge-drinking numbers: the murkier, moodier stuff that packs bars.

"Binge drinking tends to be in groups, outdrinking your friends and winning plaudits doing so," said Dr. Allen Battle, a clinical psychologist working as a professor of psychiatry at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, who has treated alcoholics in Memphis since 1952. "The problem here is not that.

"It's not the Southern culture to see who can drink the most before falling over in a heap in the way of -- good Lord -- the Russians, with their insistence on vodka at all hours."

Battle continued: "The modus vivendi here, which I have seen unfold in so many Memphians over so many years, is to sit and drink alone, drinking to excess, to give themselves a biochemical brick bat to the brain, to no longer be able to think or remember anything. Tennessee is not a state of binge drinkers; it's a state of lonely drinkers. Even lonely among friends."